Appropriate Cultural Appropriations

Why is cultural appropriation a Bad Thing?

"Cultural appropriation" is one of the silliest taboos of our
ongoing
Culture War. The other day, the Independent
published an article saying that
white women
should never wear hoop earrings because they belong to
black or Latin Culture.

We believe that nobody should wear hoop
earrings because getting them caught on something could be pretty
painful, but who are we to tell women what to wear?

This topic went over the top when an American girl posted a Facebook
picture
of herself with her prom date. Some twit noticed that she was
wearing
a Chinese qipao or cheongsam and wrote a vehement tweet
saying that she had no right to steal from Chinese culture. The
twitterverse went nuts. Googling "American
girl
wears Chinese dress to prom" found 57 million hits!

The international flame war got so intense that a British journalist
visited a Chinese neighborhood to find out what actual Chinese people
thought.
He
had a hard time getting anyone to understand what the fuss was about,
but answers split neatly by gender.

The cheongsam was designed to flatter Chinese figures and
most of the men had seen Westerners wearing cheongsam who
shouldn't have. They couldn't decide without
seeing a picture. Their consensus was that the dress was OK -
based on her contours and not on her race.

Chinese women had a different view. They giggled at the idea that
anyone would tell a woman what she could or could not wear. The
Chinese have centuries of experience observing oddball behavior by
non-Chinese barbarians, of what importance was one more example?
If we really must go there, how dare nonwhites appropriate greenbacks,
which were invented by dead white males?

Too few Americans are qualified for the jobs available. Male
working-age labor-force participation is at Depression-era
lows. Opioid abuse is widespread. Homicidal violence plagues inner
cities. Almost half of all children are born out of wedlock, and even
more are raised by single mothers. Many college students lack basic
skills, and high school students rank below those from two dozen other
countries.

The causes of these phenomena are multiple and complex, but
implicated
in these and other maladies is the breakdown of the country's
bourgeois culture.

That culture laid out the script we all were supposed to follow:
Get
married before you have children and strive to stay married for their
sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard,
and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be
a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded,
and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of
authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.

That advice isn't new. It amplifies the formula for
the
American Dream found in the Bible:

And that ye study to be quiet, and to do your own business, and to
work with your own hands, as we commanded you; That ye may walk
honestly toward them that are without, and that ye may have lack of
nothing. I Thessalonians 4:11-12

This passage is how the authors started their path to a flame war which
was
far more
intense than the cheongsam war:

These basic cultural precepts reigned from the late 1940s to the
mid-1960s. They could be followed by people of all backgrounds and
abilities, especially when backed up by almost universal
endorsement. Adherence was a major contributor to the productivity,
educational gains, and social coherence of that
period. ... [emphasis added]

The loss of bourgeois habits seriously impeded the progress of
disadvantaged groups. That trend also accelerated the destructive
consequences of the growing welfare state, which, by taking over
financial support of families, reduced the need for two parents. A
strong pro-marriage norm might have blunted this effect. Instead, the
number of single parents grew astronomically, producing children more
prone to academic failure, addiction, idleness, crime, and poverty.

Then they really stepped in it:

All cultures are not equal. Or at least they are not equal
in
preparing people to be productive
in an advanced economy. [emphasis
added]

Ms. Wax is the tenured Robert Mundheim Professor at the University
of Pennsylvania Law School.. Even though she
was
speaking of very few of the many customs which make up a culture, she'd
have been fired absent tenure because of the racism, sexism, and
other evils expressed in her op-ed.

The idea that any culture
or even a custom could
possibly be superior to any other is unthinkable. Even
though our liberals are slowly becoming aware of the evils of the
custom of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), they seem unaware
of the evils of sharia law
- and even with FGM, the horror was fairly muted when an American judge
correctly ruled the performance of FGM on one's minor children to be a practice which could be restricted only by state
law and not federal law.

Similarly, for all their talk
about the evils of poverty, liberals refuse to note that in 2017, only
6.8% of married black families were in poverty compared
with 30.8% of unmarried black mothers in that year.
There is nothing about marriage that is related to race in any way;
people
of any race have an equal ability to choose whether to assume the
obligations of marriage or not.
Why, then, do we not more strongly encourage marriage culture, when it
is known to be effective in improving the lives of all races including
those most behind, victimized, or oppressed?

Alas, liberals have decreed that anyone
who
implies that any aspect of culture or custom might have anything to do
with
happiness,
prosperity, or societal well-being is a hate-filled cultural chauvinist
who must
be silenced by any means necessary.

Technology as Culture

Most academics who specialize in literature, history, or any of the
soft sciences tend not to see technology as an important part of
culture. Their living quarters bristle with electric appliances
and
are usually heated by oil or gas furnaces without their having to
think much about it. They drive to work on paved roads and use
computers, the
Internet, and smart phones without pondering the high degree of
technical skill needed to keep these modern miracles working.

It's not possible for any nation to become wealthy without large
cities - the concentration of people of different skills makes
commerce and wealth creation possible. Amazon plans to put part
of its new headquarters in New York City specifically to take
advantage of
its intellectual infrastructure. Infectious diseases
make city living extremely hazardous in the absence of modern
sanitation, an unfortunate aspect of crowding that has been true for
thousands of years. The Guardianreports on a Swedish woman who died of plague
5,000 years ago:

"This is the earliest strain of the plague that we know about, and
it
probably played a big role in the decline of the population," said
Simon Rasmussen at the University of Copenhagen. "You suddenly have
this big outbreak and a lot of people are going to die." ...

Rasmussen believes the plague may originally have emerged as a
human
disease in the unprecedented mega-settlements that started to be built
about 6,000 years ago in what are now Ukraine, Romania and
Moldova. The settlements were home to tens of thousands. But
with so
many people living in dreadful sanitary conditions and in close
contact with animals, the sites were perfect breeding grounds for
bugs. "This is the classic, textbook example of what is needed for new
pathogens to develop," he
said. [emphasis added]

Ancient empires such as Rome had to draw country folk into the city
to
replace people who died. In the late 17th century, John
Graunt,
one
of the earliest demographers, noted that London needed about 6,000
incoming migrants per year to make up for all the people who had died.

When most people
die young, it's not possible or cost-effective to invest in mass
education - much of the investment is wasted when the young die before
they're able to do anything useful with it. Only
the
wealthy could educate their children well enough to make
technical progress by building on what had gone before. It was
also a more worthwhile investment for them, since they had the other
resources available to improve their offspring's chances of making it
through childhood alive.

Getting clean water into a city and taking dirty water out is one of
the foundational technologies of any urban civilization because its
absence is such a monumental cause of disease and death from
infection. In 1857,
no US city had a sanitary sewer system; by 1900, 80% of
urban
Americans were served by one. Even so, urban lifespans were 10
years
shorter than in rural areas in the early 1900s.

Economists David
Cutler and Grant Miller found that improved access to filtered,
chlorinated water alone accounted for nearly half the decline in
mortality experienced in American cities between 1900 and 1936.
Other measures such as pasteurization of milk and limiting apartment
crowding also helped.

In all such cases, technical progress led
to
cultural change as people became habituated to increased
cleanliness. People who lived longer were more productive and
better able to gain the knowledge required to improve their
societies. As life expectancies increased, it became more
worthwhile to invest in educating the young who were increasingly
likely to live long enough to use it and return the investment.
The
average educational level of
the modern society grew by leaps and bounds which kept increasing the
technological abilities of the society as a whole.
This virtuous cycle of incorporating cleanliness into education-driven
technical progress has led to
our high-tech civilization.

Technology has made our lives a great deal more
comfortable and given us access to incredible amounts of goods,
education, and entertainment, but there is a hidden cost: our society
needs armies of
dedicated, highly skilled
blue-collar laborers to
keep it going.

Our transportation system uses automobiles,
aircraft, subways and other forms of mass transit. First-world
agriculture is based on fossil-derived fertilizers and diesel-powered
farm equipment which feeds vast quantities of food into the
transportation system. Cell phones need the fiber optic web
of
cables and a vast number of cell phone towers. Skyscrapers need
elevators and are built in cities which need water purification systems
to supply fresh water and sewer systems to handle used water.

What happens when someone flushes a toilet at the top of a 100-story
skyscraper? How do building engineers keep water and solid waste
falling from that height from rupturing pipes at the bottom?

Maintaining all this requires a high level of education,
dedication, and competence which isn't always available even in the
United States. Despite more than a century's accumulated
experience with chemistry and other technologies needed to supply clean
water, children
have
suffered from lead poisoning due to
incompetent water supply management in cities such as New York City, Newark,
and most famously in Flint,
MI., to name a few examples.

Lead poisoning is subtle; some technical issues are more
spectacular.
On September 13, 2018, excess pressure in natural gas lines
owned
by Columbia Gas caused explosions and fires in as many as 40 homes in
the Massachusetts towns of Lawrence, Andover, and
North Andover. Although the surviving homes have electricity,
they
don't have heat, stoves, or hot water because the appliances and gas
mains
have to be replaced. Politicians are screaming that the utility
has
to pay, but what local utility has the assets to cover replacing all
the pipes in half of three towns in a few months? In the end,
ordinary
people
will pay for it all, as they always do.

Infections Coming Back; Life Span Dropping

What Ms. Wax would call "bourgeois customs" such as discouraging
rats and other vermin by not littering, not urinating or defecating in
the
streets, brushing teeth, and other basic sanitation customs are
now less respected than at the turn of the century. Infectious
diseases which had been eliminated in the US are coming back, partly
due to disagreement about who should be permitted to move
into
the United States.

Culture has consequences. Our earlier education system trained
the armies of tech workers who maintain our infrastructure, but that
sort of knowledge-based education is going out of style in favor of
building self-esteem via social engineering.

On the family front, our
culture war has led to the birth of many fatherless children. Fatherless mobs
burned down Detroit and
shoot each other in Chicago, but talking about it is a far worse
offense than an
American wearing a cheongsam. After a bloody Chicago
weekend,
the Chicago
Sun-Timesreported that although Mayor Rahm Emanuel
understood the problem
and described it well, his statements were not acceptable to
his fellow liberals.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel was accused Wednesday of victim shaming for
citing an absence of values and character in the
African-American community after the weekend bloodbath in which
71 people were shot, 12 of them fatally.

Shari Runner, until recently the president and CEO of the
Chicago
Urban League, said the mayor's blame game is offensive and
insensitive.

What does Ms. Runner expect
the
mayor to blame? The guns? The
people who use them? Straw purchasers who legally buy guns and
illegally turn them over to gang members? Public schools which
failed to
teach them
how to
tell right from wrong? Guns are already illegal in Chicago.
Harsher gun bans aren't likely to accomplish much; the problem lies
elsewhere. Ms. Runner may be offended when the mayor calls her
constituents criminals, but isn't she offended when her
constituents shoot each other? Isn't that a criminal act?

Has our culture war become so fraught that we can't even discuss
family pathologies? Murdered young men and those who die
through opioid abuse represent a serious net drain on society rather
than a positive. Professor Wax and Mayor Emanuel were correct in
pointing out that the Chicago guns-and-drugs culture doesn't prepare
young people
particularly well for success in our knowledge-driven high-tech
society.

As is our custom, we look to history for examples of earlier culture
wars so we can see how they played out. So in the next article in
this
series, we'll jump back two centuries, and contemplate the culture war
over how the Indian education system should
be organized during the British Empire period.

Great start. Looking forward to more editions. I believe Ms. Wax should be seen as one of the stalwarts of contemporary American culture. She stated the obvious....parents, education,marriage, children... but got pilloried for it. She was doing a scientific study...measuring real life results....but got smacked by the social justice warriors. They aren’t interested in facts, just selling their agenda. I guess the soft under belly of the current urban family is the lousy education system in major urban areas. Dedication to educrats compensation is not the same thing as educating young folks. Many seem to leave school feral...with their next stop the penal or rehab system. Hope that is covered in future editions.

December 20, 2018 9:39 PM

Anita Del Re said:

I am so sorry to hear that another University has axed a professor of great value. I dearly hope that Ms. Wax has better fortune in the future.